Franz Pühretmair

It’s Time to Make eTourism Accessible

“Nearly half of all handicapped people would travel more frequently, if there were more barrier-free offers. And about 40 percent have already renounced a travel because adequate offers were missing” (Max Stich, ADAC vice-president for tourism, 2003). So far the tourism industry still has hardly recognized the potential and the value of barrier-free tourism. As long as the tourism industry will not identify that barrier-free tourism is an indicator for quality, a trademark and a competitive advantage they will not attract its considerable market-share. Often the lack of not supporting barrier-free tourism is a combination of missing offers and inadequate or missing information presentation.

XML-Based Integration of GIS and Heterogeneous Tourism Information

With the tremendous growth of the Web, a broad spectrum of tourism information is already distributed over various Web sites. To fulfill the tourists request for an extensive data collection it is inevitable to make accumulated data from different sources accessible. In a first step towards a comprehensive integration of tourism data the official Austrian destination information and booking system TIScover is extended with a flexible data interchange adapter which allows interchange of structured data with other tourism information systems.Beside the problem of distributed data sources tourists are also confronted with differences concerning information presentation on various Web sites. To cope with this problem our approach extensively uses maps for data presentation and federation of multiple structured and semi-structured tourism information sources on the Web. For this purpose touristic maps are generated dynamically including data resulting from database queries. This concept allows a clear and meaningful representation of up-to-date tourism information embedded in a geographical context.

Making sense of accessibility in IT design - usable accessibility vs. accessible usability

The Internet with its nearly unlimited offer for information, services and functionalities for communication has become an essential part of business and private life within the last years. Recent information and communication technologies (ICT) together with the Internet offer also new impressing possibilities for people with disabilities. However people with disabilities often hit barriers when using ICT and the Internet. Usually, this is not because of the restricted users information perception (visually, auditory, haptic) - people with special needs use assistive technologies that compensate particular disabilities. Mostly, they cannot make use of ICT and the Internet because designers and developers do not follow rules and guidelines for accessibility and usability. Comprehensibility, clarity, readability, high-quality, up-to-dateness and intuitive operation and use, are important criterions that are essential for customer satisfaction, loyalty, quality and success. Therefore accessibility and usability has important advantages for all users, not only for people with disabilities.

AsTeRICS, a Flexible Assistive Technology Construction Set

Abstract Over the last decades a considerable number of information and communication technology based Assistive Technology devices have become available for people with disabilities. These Assistive Technology devices often ask for adaptation of software and/or hardware to fit the users abilities before they can be used. Within the Project AsTeRICS, a flexible and affordable construction set for the implementation of user driven assistive technologies solutions will be developed. This allows the combination of different sensors to process and manipulate the sensor data to control any supported device. This paper will show how a webcam mouse (head tracker) and a single switch mouse can easily be created and tailored to the user needs and possibilities. Additionally, results of user tests with the head tracker will be presented.

Accessible Content Generation an Integral Part of Accessible Web Design

Abstract The importance of accessible Web design significantly rose within the last years. This is also reflected in a growing set of legal regulations that demand for accessible Web design. Unfortunately these regulations usually consider technical accessibility only, the complexity of the language used plays a minor role. Thus a huge group of people cannot make use of the content presented on Web pages. This paper discusses in detail the important interaction of accessible Web design and Easy-to-Read to generate accessible content and shows which phases of the design process demand for intensive user involvement.

Accessible Web Content: A Noble Desire or a Need?☆

Abstract The implementation of information that is easy-to-read and easy-to-understand on the Web is crucial to enable the broadest user group possible to make use of information that is presented on Web pages. Besides aspects of technical accessibility in terms of being able to reach the information, readability, understandability and memorability is an essential aspect of accessibility for people with disabilities and more user-friendly for all others. The paper presents different levels of accessible content and discusses how accessible content generation can reduce the complexity of the Web.

ENABLE --- A View on User's Needs

The ENABLE project, which is partly funded by the European Commission, aims to assist elderly people to live well, independently and at ease. In this project a wrist unit with both integrated and external sensors, and with a radio frequency link to a mobile phone, will be developed. ENABLE will provide a number of services for elderly people, among them also a remote control service for the home environment. This paper briefly describes the project in general and then focuses on the initial user needs investigation which was carried out in early 2007 in six different European countries. The provisional findings are discussed and an outlook on the ongoing and future project work is given. A special focus of this paper is on the environmental control service.

A Flexible Concept to Establish Accessibility Information in Tourism Web-Pages

Accessible tourism that comprises the market of people with disabilities and elderly travelers is far away from being a niche market. Nevertheless it is characterized by missing, insufficient or inaccurate accessibility information on tourism objects. The presented approach demonstrates how it is possible to overcome this deficits and how this growing but neglected market can be supported. The fundamental idea is to aggregate up-to-date, trustable and comparable accessibility information in a central accessibility database. A service-oriented architecture enables information providers to flexibly access and query accessibility information stored in the database by the use of Web services. Consequently, the accessibility information delivered can be integrated in information portals and homepages, thus enabling a wide spreading of accessibility information which is the main focus of this paper.

Strategies for E-commerce Applications in Tourism

Tourism industry has more and more realized the potential of Web-based tourism information systems (TIS) to increase the competitiveness by providing individual and specialized information about tourism objects. This lead to a broad spectrum of tourism information systems distributed over various Web sites. But the described situation is not really satisfying for users of such systems, the tourists, which require flexible and easy-to-use search functionalities and adequate user interfaces. To fulfill the tourists request for an extensive data collection on the one hand and to provide adequate search functionalities on the other hand, it is necessary to make accumulated data from different sources accessible. The integration of distributed data sources has great impact on the quality of tourism information systems and follows the trend not to implement further systems, but to extend and improve existing systems. Beside data integration, in this paper flexible electronic data interchange mechanisms, advanced search functionalities and powerful visualization possibilities are identified as the most important strategies to improve and enhance near future tourism information systems.

Realizing accessible tourism by matching stakeholders: introduction to the special thematic session

The following paper discusses the necessity for a tourism for all which is realized along the whole tourism service chain and the need to match various stakeholders. It points out that policy- and management-driven activities are advantageous and that the achievement of ambitious goals has to be realized by single steps.